Abstract
The present contribution aims to describe the uses of the singular third-person pronoun with non-referential features in the Ladin varieties of the Fassa, Gardena and Badia valleys, adopting the perspective of contact-induced change. The investigated area, Trentino and South Tyrol, is indeed a multilingual territory. Firstly, the pronominal system of both the Ladin varieties and the contact languages will be briefly described, in particular the Trentino dialect for Fassa, and the South Tyrolean dialect and German for the Gardena and Badia valleys. The data used to support the survey are those obtained from the Linguistic Atlas of Dolomitic Ladinian and neighbouring dialects (ALD-I and ALD-II; Goebl et al. 1998; Goebl 2012), the grammar books of the languages investigated and the conversational data from the corpus Kontatti. We will successively focus on the expression of the pleonastic pronoun through a comparative perspective, in order to observe whether the contact has influenced the expression and the contexts of expression of the expletive pronoun. The characteristics of the pleonastic pronoun that will be considered are the following: i) the possibility to express the grammatical function of a subject; ii) the function of mere inflectional element; iii) the function of ‘place holder’ with the aim of occupying the first position preceding the finite verb; iv) the function of correlative element, that reveals the presence of a subordinate clause. Besides, we will illustrate the morphosyntactic contexts in which the expletive is expressed and, on the contrary, in which the explication is not mandatory, when not forbidden. Finally, light will be shed on the type of morphosyntactic agreement with the subject and on the position of the expletive with respect to the main verb.